The stark bottom line in the case was the fact that Jones was not a licensed sales representative. One simple phone call, or quick web search, may have saved his clients from losing any money.

"The starting point is that clients do their homework," says Ian Russell, president and CEO of the Investment Industry Association of Canada, or IIAC, in Toronto. "The first step is to make sure that you're dealing with a regulated investment process, but people seem to schlep over that, so hopefully these episodes will be a wake-up call."

Russell considers the best safeguard is to find out if the adviser and the firm he says he is associated with are registered with the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada, or IIROC, the country's main investment industry watchdog. It's simply a matter of clicking onto the IIROC web site to confirm that the individual and the firm are properly registered.